The foods we buy and eat and Information Cascade
You go to the grocery market. I don’t know where you usually browse, or if you browse at all; but, you will see words, symbols, colors, and fonts. Unless you are strictly in the part of the produce section where the fruits and vegetables are laying bare, you will see all sorts of foods packaged. You might see packaged, “cleaned and cut” greens, peanut butter in a jar, durum wheat pasta in a tidy box, bakery fresh cookies in a see through plastic bin, and “pop it in the oven or microwave” frozen dinners.
If you look closely at the eye catching front, side, top, and back packaging of the food product, aside from the real information at the back of the product after “Ingredients:”, you will be able to see a picture of how the food might look when it’s ready to eat, whether it is organic, free-range, cage-free, gluten-free, cruelty-free, low fat, sugar free, low sodium, 150 calories per serving, chemical-free, carrageenan free, bpa free, locally made, and high fructose corn syrup-free.
Some people care about how their food is made, what it’s made out of, and whether it is doing their body what food is supposed to do: nourish us, energize us, and make us feel good.
Some people have an emotional relationship with food that is negative: they are over eating or under eating, and eating foods that are high in chemicals or have a concentrated amount of sugar or refined oils.
It’s easy for someone who doesn’t know much about nutrition to pick up any food in the grocery market and be pleased about their purchase because the packaging promises that the food is all natural, or organic, chemical free, and low in fat or sugar.
However, the truth is that many of these labels are in fact influenced by diet fads.
Diet fads are related to consumer behavior and what we learned in class today about information cascade.
Information cascade is the phenomenon that occurs when people make decisions based on the decisions of others, without knowing the direct information that others use to make their own decisions. Therefore, an error is easily made, meaning that when many people make decisions based on the judgment of others, everyone may be going down the poorly picked path.
The low fat fad is one specific information cascade phenomenon. A blog post in 2007 on the New York Times webpage, How a low fat low fact cascade just keeps rolling along briefly discusses how there is a faulty belief that low fat diet prolongs a person’s life.
Such is only one example of the low quality information that is marketed toward consumers that do not know much about nutrition.
Here are five tips for nutrition:
- Eat a variety of fresh vegetables, fruits, wild meats and sea foods
- Know where your food comes from: preferably local or caught recently
- When you are choosing packaged foods that say “low-fat” “low-cal” “low-sodium” “all-natural” or any other supposedly positive claim about the food, turn it over to read the ingredients. Then determine for yourself if you’re okay with the added chemicals that you don’t understand, or strange things like “powdered milk” or “dehydrated carrots” that just don’t sound appealing. Why give money to people who don’t care about your well-being?
- Check out Cornell’s food lab which also has great information about nutrition and choosing wisely. I’m not affiliated with Cornell’s food lab research, but it has some fascinating observations about consumer behavior and how we can make better choices for our health.
- Lastly, don’t fall into the information cascade diet fad trap! Eat fresh foods that are packed with nutrients and avoid things that were not made with you or love for you in mind. Be smart and don’t listen to labels that have fancy and pretty packaging. Low fat, low cal, low sodium, are all part of the marketing tricks. Nutrition is more complicated than those simple promises on the processed food. Choose wisely and do your own research!
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